Description

This talk discusses the role of the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS) in managing identity and access control for apps running on the Windows platform . ACS offers developers the means to offload most of the complexity of handling authentication, regardless of where the app will be hosted or from where it will be consumed, to a cloud-hosted service. After a brief introduction to the approach behind ACS, the talk will highlight how developers can take advantage of Windows Identity Foundation to easily connect to ACS, and will demonstrate various scenarios ACS unlocks such as enabling Windows 8 apps to authenticate users from Facebook, Google, or Windows Live ID and reusing AD accounts with apps hosted in Windows Azure without requiring Windows Azure Connect.

The Discussion

Thank you Vittorio. Your presentations are a pleasure to watch and you did a great job of simplifying structure for an important and complicated issue. It was great that you brought up remote medicine apps to make clear the point that Identity is important as the example you used of a heart monitor would then be relayed to a doctor (or more likely a computer program), which then fires back a signal to shock the patients heart. The need for Identity and a secure ACS across devices, browsers and sites is critical in those types of applications.